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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Understanding The Frequency Response Term Of The Latest Music Amplifiers

By Marta McBrian


The frequency response is quite possibly the most commonly found parameter in order to characterize audio amps. However, it might regularly be confusing and might not necessarily offer a good sign of the sound quality. You may possibly not completely understand exactly how the frequency response is calculated. I am going to clarify what exactly this particular expression means. Hopefully you will be able to make a much more well informed buying decision.

In reality, an amplifier with a frequency response from 10 Hz to 30 kHz can actually have much poorer sound quality than an amp which provides a frequency response from 20 Hz to 15 kHz. Different makers seem to employ different ways to define frequency response. Normally, the frequency response displays the normal operating range of the amp. Inside this range, the amp gain is essentially constant. At the lower and upper cutoff frequencies the gain is going to decrease by no more than 3 decibels.

A large frequency response doesn't imply the amplifier provides excellent audio quality. For instance an amp having a frequency response between 30 Hz and 15 kHz might sound a lot better than a different amplifier having a response between 10 Hz and 30 kHz. Also, each supplier, it appears, implements a different technique of specifying the lowest and highest frequency of their amps. The standard convention is to present the frequency range inside of which the gain will decrease a maximum of 3 dB from the nominal gain. On the other hand, a number of makers push this standard to the limit and may show an upper frequency where the amplifier is going to hardly create a signal anymore. Furthermore, merely looking at these 2 numbers will not say much about the linearity of the frequency response. Therefore it is ideal to possess a complete frequency response graph. This sort of chart will reveal whether there are any kind of major peaks and valleys inside the working frequency range. Peaks along with valleys leads to colorization of the audio. Preferably the amp needs to have a constant gain within the entire frequency response except for the drop off at the upper and lower limit. Apart from the frequency response, a phase response chart will also say a great deal about the overall performance and also sound quality of the amp.

The frequency response of Class-D amplifiers shows the biggest change with different speaker loads because of the built-in lowpass filter that removes switching noise from the amplifier's signal. Then again, the frequency response of the amplifier now depends on the loudspeaker load because the behavior of this lowpass filter is affected by the load impedance. Typically the lower the loudspeaker load impedance the lower the upper cut-off frequency of the amp

Various amps incorporate feedback to be able to compensate for changes in gain caused by different connected loads. One more approach is to provide specific outputs for various speaker impedances that are attached to the amplifier power phase by way of audio transformers.




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